Athena is a highly regarded theme on WordPress.org with over 20,000 lively installs. It’s designed to be a multi-purpose theme that can be utilized for blogs, companies, eCommerce websites, and extra.
Athena is by Smartcat, builders of a number of free and premium WordPress themes and plugins, although Athena is their hottest.
Options of Athena
Athena has just a few primary choices to customise your website. Listed below are the important thing options:
Customizable Design
Many of the theme’s options could be accessed through the Look » Customise menu.
Beneath Look you may change the colours and fonts, weblog structure, and allow or disable the site searchicon that shows within the header and footer.
Should you click on on Pores and skin Shade, you may select from 6 totally different predefined coloration schemes. (There’s no solution to set your individual colours from the menu with out having to modify your website’s CSS manually.)
A few these coloration schemes aren’t very useable, although. The darkish blue hyperlinks are virtually indistinguishable from the black textual content, and hyperlinks aren’t underlined, so it’s very troublesome to inform what’s a hyperlink and what isn’t.
The yellow is simply too troublesome to learn towards the white background. It’s very poor for usability due to the shortage of distinction, as you may see on this net accessibility take a look at for coloration distinction:
Beneath Fonts, you may choose separate fonts for the headers and physique textual content, and select the font dimension for the menu and content material.
There are additionally two weblog layouts you may choose for the entrance web page: both tiles (two columns of posts with featured pictures), or stacked (a one-column checklist of posts with featured pictures).
Beneath Look » Customise » Footer, you may change the social hyperlinks and the higher copyright textual content, however you may’t disable the “Design by Smartcat” hyperlink on the backside with out shopping for the professional model, except you edit the code to cover it.
Homepage Slider
The entrance web page options a big full-width slider which you can customise from the Look » Customise » Slider menu. There are two slides you may edit.
For every slide, you may change the picture, header textual content, and add 2 buttons.
It doesn’t give any suggestions on picture sizes. The pictures will at all times stretch to suit the display screen, so a small picture will look blurry and pixelated on a big display screen. However utilizing very giant pictures will trigger the slider to load slowly.
(Should you want a sooner slider, we suggest Soliloquy. Take a look at our Soliloquy assessment for extra particulars.)
6 Widget Areas
Athena comes with 6 widget areas:
- Proper Sidebar
- Left Sidebar
- Footer: shows widgets in three columns
- Homepage: shows instantly beneath the slider on the homepage
- Store Sidebar (WooCommerce): there isn’t a documentation on the place this shows
- Slider Overlay: see under for particulars on how this works
The precise and left sidebars show in your homepage, posts, and pages. You’ll be able to simply use one, or go away them clean to disable them and show the content material full width on each web page.
The “Overlay” widget space is meant to show in a popup when a customer clicks on an icon in your homepage slider. It may be enabled from the Look » Customise » Frontpage » Overlay menu.
However the icon could be very small and doubtless received’t be seen by your guests, particularly as a result of your slider textual content and buttons are drawing eyes to the alternative aspect of the display screen.
Unlock Extra Options With Athena Professional
There’s a premium model of the theme referred to as Athena Professional. It provides extra options to the theme, together with:
- 9 web page templates
- built-in contact type
- embrace as much as 5 slides within the homepage slider
- extra widget areas for the homepage
- 6 extra coloration schemes
- take away the Smartcat hyperlink from the footer
The professional model is on the market for $50, but it surely doesn’t specify if the license ever expires. There’s an choice to renew your license within the checkout, so it appears it’s a risk.
Documentation and Help
There’s documentation for Athena obtainable on the Smartcat web site that goes over a lot of the options, although it’s lacking some info and will use extra particulars and screenshots. For instance, it’s fairly imprecise about among the particular widget areas and the place they show.
